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Standing with a small group of supporters, the three men held a news briefing outside the school district administration building before Thursday night’s school board meeting. They believe children will get better educations if they have more positive adult role models to whom they can relate.

“We are here because of our kids,” said Daniel Bosket, president of the Allentown chapter of the NAACP. “Our kids are the future. We’re not going to stand idly by and see our kids not receive the quality of education that they deserve, in an environment which is conducive to helping them learn.

“We’re also not going to allow productive resources that support our students to leave the school district and not do anything pro-actively to try to keep them.”

The speakers said for years the district has been promising to improve diversity by hiring and retaining many more African-American and Latino teachers and administrators, but that hasn’t happened.

They also said the district has failed to implement recommendations made several years ago by its own diversity committee.

The environment at ASD “is at best tepid toward diversity issues, at worst hostile toward diversity issues,” said Ed DeGrace, who described himself as a long-time Latino community activist. “The school district’s posture is that ‘we don’t have a problem.’

Clearly there is a problem. If they don’t accept the fact that they have a problem, certainly there’s not going to be a solution.”

DeGrace said several years ago, Superintendent C. Russell Mayo publicly promised to increase minority hiring, but that never happened.

DeGrace said in every category of employment “the number of representatives of people of color has gone down.”

“We seem to be going backwards,” agreed Bosket.

Bosket said representatives of both Allentown’s Latino and African-American communities have expressed concerns about diversity issues directly to Mayo in several meetings, but there has been a lack of response by the superintendent.

“We have followed district-established protocol with the administration, and we feel we have been ignored,” said Carlos Lopez, a former ASD principal and school board member.

Lopez said the news conference was called “to alert members of the school board to the unresolved grievances that can lead to legal action if they continue to be ignored.”

Bosket called on the community to get involved by encouraging the school district to do the right thing for the children it educates.

“We’ve been asking for this for about 20 years,” said Lopez.

Superintendent Mayo could not be reached for comment after the news conference.

District spokeswoman Kimberly Benner said a meeting with minority community leaders is scheduled for next week.

This year, nearly 66 percent of the total ASD student body is Hispanic, 16 percent is black and 14 percent is white, according to demographic information on ASD’s web site.

The minority is the majority, said DeGrace.

Bosket and DeGrace served on a school district diversity task force organized by Mayo in 2005, not long after Mayo was hired as deputy superintendent.ASD fails to provide a staff that reflects its student population, contend minority spokesmenDeGrace said the task force recommended doubling the number of minority employees in all areas of the district by 2010, but that never happened.

He said the task force worked 1,980 hours to develop a plan that would address a lack of minority representation “across the board” at ASD – from maintenance and food service personnel to top administrators.

That plan recommended doing a climate survey to learn how people in the district felt about diversity issues. DeGrace said results of that survey “were never quantified or defined.”